Participatory culture, an opposing concept to consumer culture, is a culture in which consumers act as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media.
Modern technological advancements (mostly personal computers and the Internet) have enabled private persons to create and publish media, usually through the Internet. Since technology enables new forms of expression and engagement in public discourse, participatory culture supports individual creation and informal relationships that pair novices with experts.Jenkins, Henry, Puroshotma, Ravi, Clinton, Katherine, Weigel, Margaret, & Robison, Alice J. (2005). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, available at http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/NMLWhitePaper.pdf. Retrieved on 2/4/2013. This new culture, as it relates to the Internet, has been described as Web 2.0. In participatory culture, "young people creatively respond to a plethora of electronic signals and cultural commodities in ways that surprise their makers, finding meanings and identities never meant to be there and defying simple nostrums that bewail the manipulation or passivity of 'consumers'."
The increasing availability of the Internet increasingly enables people to work collaboratively, generate and disseminate news, ideas, and creative works, and connect with people who share similar goals and interests (see affinity groups). The potential of participatory culture for civic engagement and creative expression has been investigated by media scholar Henry Jenkins. In 2009, Jenkins and co-authors Ravi Purushotma, Katie Clinton, Margaret Weigel and Alice Robison authored a white paper entitled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. This paper describes a participatory culture as one:
With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement With strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices Where members believe that their contributions matter Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).
History Participatory culture predates the Internet. The emergence of the Amateur Press Association in the middle of the 19th century is an example of historical participatory culture; at that time, young people were typing and printing their own publications by hand. These publications were mailed throughout a network of people and resemble modern social networks. The displacement of old media such as zines, radio shows, group projects, and gossip by new media such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, and social networks has greatly impacted society. The implications of the gradual shift from production to produsage are profound and will affect the core of culture, economy, society, and democracy.
Forms
Forms of participatory culture can be manifested in affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem solving, and circulations: Affiliations include both formal and informal memberships in online communities such as discussion boards or social media. Expression refers to the types of media that could be created. This may manifest as memes, fanfiction, or other forms of mash-ups. When individuals and groups work together on a particular form of media or media product, like a wiki, they engage in collaborative problem solving. Circulation refers to the means through which the communication may be spread. This could include blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and even some forms of social media. Some of the most popular apps that involve participation include Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder, LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok.
Fanfiction creators were one of the first communities to demonstrate how the public could participate in pop culture by changing, growing, and altering TV show storylines during their run times, as well as strengthening the series' popularity after the last episode aired. Some fan fiction creators develop theories and speculation, while others create 'new' material outside of the confines of the original content. Fans expand on the original story such as by putting the characters falling in love within the series through different adventures and sexualities. These communities are composed of audiences and readers from around the world, at different ages, with different backgrounds, coming together to develop theories and possibilities about current TV shows, books and films, or expand and continue the stories of works that are no longer in production.
Social media Viewers no longer blindly consume content distributed by large media corporations. Today, many consumers are "prosumers" who produce their own content. Social media platforms make it easier to reach global audiences.
Social media and politics Social media has become a huge factor in politics and civics in elections, fundraising, spreading information, getting support for legislation and petitions, and other political activities. Social media mobilizes people easily and effectively, and does the same for the circulation of information. The impact that social media can have on elections was shown in the 2016 United States presidential election; hundreds of fake news stories about candidates were shared on Facebook tens of millions of times. Some people get deceived by fake news and vote based on false information.
Web 2.0
With hardware, users can upload content to the internet to be reached by a wide audience. Websites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and Facebook create online communities for content creation.
As the mindsets and skillsets of participatory practices have been taken up, people are becoming more likely to exploit new tools and technology in new ways. One example is the use of cellphone technology to engage "smart mobs" for political change worldwide. In countries where cellphone usage exceeds use of any other form of digital technology, passing information via mobile phone has helped bring about significant political and social change. Notable examples include the so-called "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, the overthrow of Philippine President Joseph Estrada,Ellis, Eric. (2001-01-23). Asia Buzz: Revolution. How text messaging toppled Joseph Estrada. Time Asia, . Retrieved on 2009-01-26. and regular political protests worldwide.Zuckerman, Ethan. (2007-06-20). Mobile Phones and Social Activism:Why cell phones may be the most important technical innovation of the decade. TechSoup, . Retrieved on 2009-01-26.
Relation to smartphones Smartphones combine the elements of interactivity, identity, and mobility. Viewers become actively involved in making decisions, navigating pages, contributing their own content and choosing what links to follow. The consumer role shifts from a passive receiver to an active contributor. Smartphones give users various ways to get personally involved with multiple forms of media at the same time, in a nonlinear way.
Smartphones also change the perception of identity; a user can hide behind an avatar, false profile, or simply an idealized self when interacting with others online. There is no accountability to be who one says one is. The ability to slide in and out of roles changes media's effect on culture and users themselves.
Producers, consumers, and "produsage" In Vincent Miller's Understanding Digital Culture, he makes the argument that the lines between producer and consumers have become blurry. Producers create content and cultural objects, and consumers are the audience or purchasers of those objects. By referring to Axel Bruns' idea of "prosumer," Miller argues:
"Prosumers" are the end result of an increasingly-used strategy that encourages feedback between producers and consumers, "which allows for more consumer influence over the production of goods."
Bruns (2008) refers to produsage as a form of community collaboration that participants can access to share "content, contributions, and tasks throughout the networked community". This is similar to how Wikipedia allows users to write, edit, and use content. As active participants, producers are empowered by their participation as network builders. Bruns (2008) describes the empowerment for users as different from the typical "top-down mediated spaces of the traditional mediaspheres". Produsage occurs when the users are the producers and vice versa, which eliminates the need for "top-down" interventions. The collaboration of each participant is based on a principle of inclusivity; each member contributes valuable information for another user to use, add to, or change. In a community of learners, collaboration through produsage can provide access to content for every participant, not just those with some kind of authority. Every participant has authority.
This leads to Bruns' (2008) idea of "equipotentiality: the assumption that while the skills and abilities of all the participants in the produsage project are not equal, they have an equal ability to make a worthy contribution to the project". Because there are no more distinctions between producers and consumers, every participant has an equal chance to participate meaningfully in produsage.Reference 3
In July 2020, an academic publication reported on the nature and rise of the "robot prosumer", derived from modern-day technology and related participatory culture, which was anticipated earlier by Frederik Pohl and other science fiction writers.
Explicit and implicit participation Media theorist Mirko Tobias Schäfer made a distinction between explicit and implicit participation in 2011: Explicit participation describes the conscious and active engagement of users in fan communities or of developers in creative processes. Implicit participation is more subtle and unfolds often without the user's knowledge. In her 2013 book The Culture of Connectivity, Jose Van Dijck emphasizes the importance of recognizing this distinction in order to thoroughly analyze user agency as a techno-cultural construct.
Dijck (2013) outlines various ways of conceptualizing explicit participation. The first is the statistical conception of user demographics. Websites may "publish facts and figures about their user intensity (e.g., unique monthly users), their national and global user diversity, and relevant demographic facts". For instance, Facebook publishes user demographic data such as gender, age, income, and education level. Explicit participation can also take place on the research end, where an experimental subject interacts with a platform for research purposes.
Dijck (2013) references Leon et al. (2011), giving an example of an experimental study where "a number of users may be selected to perform tasks so researchers can observe their ability to control privacy settings ". Lastly, explicit participation may inform ethnographic data through observational studies, or qualitative interview-based research concerning user habits.
Implicit participation is achieved by implementing user activities into user interfaces and back-end design. Schäfer argues that the success of popular Web 2.0 and social media applications thrives on implicit participation. The notion of implicit participation expands theories of participatory culture as formulated by Henry Jenkins and Axel Bruns, who both focus most prominently on explicit participation. The consideration of implicit participation allows for a more accurate analysis of technology's role in co-shaping user interactions and user-generated content.
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